shawnethomas

One of the best known memoirs of the Holocaust is Night by Elie Wiesel. Wiesel was a devout Jew before his experience in the Nazi death camps, but his time there destroyed his faith. He wrote, “Why, but why should I bless Him? In every fiber I rebelled. Because He had had thousands of children burned in His pits? Because He kept six crematories working night and day, on Sunday and feast days? Because in His great might He had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many factories of death? How could I say to Him: ‘Blessed art Thou, Eternal, Master of the Universe, Who chose us from among the races to be tortured day and night, to see our fathers, our mothers, our brothers, end in the crematory?” (Night, 64-65). What happened to him, and what he saw happening around him, raised questions that caused him to give up his faith. (Nik Ripken, the author of the video we’re going to watch the next several Wednesday nights, was like that. He lost his son on the mission field, and he was asking, “Is God insane for asking His people to make sacrifices like that?” God’s NOT insane; but these kinds of questions are real, and difficult.)

The author of Psalm 73, Asaph, was almost like Elie Wiesel. This Psalm is his very personal testimony. He opens it with a truth: “Surely God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart.” But then he begins to tell his own personal testimony in :2, “But as for me, my feet came close to stumbling.” He says God is good; I know that — but I came close to stumbling (in the Bible “stumbling” means to be lost; to give up the faith. In the NT Jesus says “don’t cause one of these little ones to stumble” — that means don’t do anything that might cause someone to be lost.) So here Asaph says, basically, I almost gave up the faith! He DIDN’T — but he said, he almost did. He was really troubled by what he had seen in the world around him, and it raised questions which bothered him. Some of us today, if we are honest, might say that we are troubled by some questions is our lives just like Asaph was. What caused Asaph to almost lose his faith, and what brought him out of it — and how can this help those of us today, who might have some questions like he did? Continue reading →